on the first pic you can see three different brightness levels of the screen (device has just been turned off). this is not a shadow falling on the screen!
it gets darker from the upper left to the lower right.

in the third picture you can see how dark it is when reading. the bar with the chapter number used to be a mid gray against the 'white' paper. now it's almost indistinguishable from the background.

maybe one of the irex guys can comment on this, so i don't have to post this on both forums.

irex confirmed that my iliad has to be sent in for repair!
i guess, they will replace the screen.

does anyone know if it's possible to get the bigger battery while they're working on it anyway (haven't heard back from them on this one)?

so, another iliad 'bites the dust'.
is there a 'body count' thread? we should do one with the problems that ocurred and what was done about it (repaired, exchanged...). the hardware seems quite faulty, even for a 1st gen device.

I would love to have at least a simplified explanation of how this darkening of the screen can happen; I thought I had at least a basic understanding of how e-ink works, but I cannot figure out why the display would get darker in certain spots, making it look like an infection or something. If the e-ink particles for some reason lost their ability to react to the processor's commands, wouldn't the screen look more like a tv that's not set to a station? White noise?

Perhaps if only one set of particles (i.e. the black ones) lost their charges.

this sounds reasonable.
maybe the wacom stylus support plays a role here also. doesn't the wacom technology use some kind of induction based location detection for the stylus? that would mean that there has to be a megnetic field around the display. that would mess up the screen.
i could be totally wrong on this, though.

does anyone know if there is a difference in size of the black/white particles between the ilad and the sony reader? is the higher resolution of the iliad just added 'pixels' or are the pixels smaller also?

maybe they should have gone with the 'proven' 800x600 screen that everyone else uses.

Wow. I hadn't even thought about what sort of effect the Wacom might have on the system .... I don't know enough about the details of either to make any kind of real evaluation, but the effects could be significant.

On the other hand, that's the sort of thing you'd hope a manufacturer, who does have all those details (and access to folks who actually understand them), would take into consideration before they slap the two pieces together in a big, juicy techno-sandwich.

yeah, that's what i thought for a few weeks, too. but for me it really got harder and harder to read over time. then i noticed that a gray bar with chapter numbers (see post above for pic) had almost the same color as the 'white background' and the different colored areas of the screen became more and more obvious.

i've printed out the gray scale from the pics above and compared it for another two weeks. the screen's darkest area shifted almost two levels to the darker grays.

printing out the 16 level gray scale is quite useful. you can track your screen change and compare it to other iliads.

to print the scale, you need a graphic program that understand hex color values (almost any program does that). than you draw 16 squares/rectangles/bars, whatever, and fill them with the grays. the 16 gray values run from #ffffff (white) through #000000 (black).

that screen on your first picture looks a lot like my first pic. the brightest area on the top of the screen and the diagonal dark area about the half screen down (i don't have the bright area on the lower right). and it looks too dark overall.

you can definitely see a pattern here.

i have started a thread in the irex support forum. maybe you should post there also (with a link to your pictures). they can tell you what to do.